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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27065515">We Aren’t So Different, You And I</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowhere_dawn_death_phan/pseuds/nowhere_dawn_death_phan'>nowhere_dawn_death_phan</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Torchwood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>A different take on his scenes during the episode, Gen, Tag to S2 E8 - A Day In The Death, because the writers missed an opportunity, parallels people parallels, references to alcohol/suicide, slight existentialism from owen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 21:55:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,603</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27065515</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowhere_dawn_death_phan/pseuds/nowhere_dawn_death_phan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Spending his nights on roofs is far more Jack’s style than Owen’s, but when needs must, he supposes. Besides, he’s got a past full of secrets and all the time in the world to tell them.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Owen Harper &amp; Maggie Hopley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>We Aren’t So Different, You And I</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You couldn't care less about me and I don't care about you. Just because we're both planning on jumping, it doesn't mean we have some sort of special connection.” Maggie looks at him out of the corner of her eye, arms folded tightly across her chest, and Owen can already tell she has a stubborn streak a mile long. Just like somebody else he used to know. <br/>Owen tries to laugh, though it comes out sounding bitter. “You don’t know the half of it.”<br/>She drops her arms, twisting on the spot a little more to face him, sounding surprisingly confident. “Try me.”<br/>He’s not entirely sure what’s happening, why he’s so willing to spill his heart and soul to a stranger when he can’t even usually bear to say the words to himself, when the only people alive that know are Jack and Tosh and maybe his mother, but the words find their place on his tongue anyway and they fall neatly into the cold air with a lack of resistance that manages to surprise him. “My fiancee died.” <br/>“Oh.” All of the triumph in Maggie’s voice goes with that single sound. “I’m sorry.”<br/>Owen laughs again, he can’t help it this time, and adjusts the front of his jacket to avoid looking at her. “You won’t let me say sorry to you but you’ll say sorry to me? Doesn’t seem fair.”<br/>“It’s different.” She turns fully to face him, her back to the ledge. “It’s different if you both understand how it feels. That’s empathy. I don’t mind empathy. It’s sympathy I hate.” <br/>“It’s a bit more nuanced than that, just sympathy and empathy and understanding.” Owen says, stepping a little closer to her. “And it’s pity you hate, not sympathy. We all need to accept a little bit of sympathy now and then. It does us good.” <br/>“Maybe you should try taking your own advice.” Maggie shifts her weight and lets her arms drop to her sides. “Accept some of that sympathy from your friends.”<br/>Owen sighs, or as close as he can get to it these days. “I’m dead, I think sympathy is a bit redundant at this point.” <br/>Maggie shrugs, and he thinks he sees her smile a little. “Fair enough.” </p><p>Those three words have changed a lot, Owen realises. Not that he’s one for the belief in kindred spirits or anything like that, and not that he thinks that knowing how she feels is somehow going to magically fix all of her problems, but there’s an understanding of sorts between them now, and it’s refreshing. He knows what she means when she talks about other people, the way they react, the way they move on. He’s never really spoken to anybody else about it. He’d tried, with Ianto, but that had been more of a complicated scenario and neither of them were particularly talkative people, so it had turned into unnecessarily long sips of coffee and stuttered filler words pretty quickly. They might have lasted ten excruciatingly awkward minutes before Owen had waved him away, deciding that the whole affair was probably going to end up causing more issues than it solved. Yeah, his track record could use some work. <br/>“How long has it been since…”<br/>Owen sighs again, fixes his eyes on the skyline. He’s come this far, too late to turn back now. “In eleven days it’ll be four years.” <br/>“Does...Does it get easier?” <br/>Owen looks at her for a moment. “A little. It’s never easy but it’s easier. Every day it gets a tiny bit easier, and maybe you won’t notice at first but then suddenly you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come.” He laughs, a sudden sharp sound that has no humour behind it. “I’ve never said any of this before. Not to my boss, not to my friends, not to anybody. Maybe I’d be better off if I had.”<br/>“I’ll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours?”<br/>“Sure. You go first.” Owen walks back to the ledge, and sits himself down on the wall, his back to the city, eyes on Maggie.<br/>She moves to sit next to him and he shifts across a little to give her space, patting the cold stone as though it’s a cushion on the Hub sofa and not the lip of a rooftop. <br/>She settles herself, her fingers curling around the edge of the brickwork, leaning forwards a little with her hair hanging over her face. “Brian used to say I talked too much.”</p><p>Owen smiles a little at that, the memory of a typical couples squabble. The mundane things in life that still somehow manage to be exciting. “Was he right?”<br/>“Probably.” Maggie smiles for a second too before it fades. “It was our wedding day. The best day of our lives. We’d only been married an hour.”<br/>Owen listens, looking at her through the darkness as she talks, her fingers curling tighter on the brick. When he speaks up, it’s those empty words again. “I’m sorry.”<br/>“I know.” Maggie looks up at him. “What about you? That was the deal.”<br/>Owen leans forwards, resting his elbows on his knees. “She was perfect. Smart and gorgeous and brilliant, but maybe I’m biased.”<br/>“What was her name?”<br/>“Katie. Katie Russell.”<br/>“Were you expecting it?”<br/>Owen doesn’t know how to answer her. Yes? No? A little bit? Maybe? He was but not then and even then not really. What he thought would happen and what he knew to expect in reality were two different things, they always had been. Maybe that didn’t make sense to anybody but him. “No. No, I don’t think I was.”<br/>“You don’t think?”<br/>Owen shakes his head. “It’s a long story. I’d promised her a summer wedding, but a few days before she died, she suggested we move it forwards a little. She wanted to be able to remember it. For the space of maybe half a day it really felt like everything was going to be okay again.” He sits up straight. “And then it all went to shit, and suddenly I was looking for a funeral suit instead of a wedding one.”<br/>“I’m sorry.”<br/>“I know.” </p><p>Neither of them speak for a moment, and Owen turns his head to look at the city behind him. He doesn’t know what time it is. The sun isn’t starting to rise yet, so it must still be fairly early in the morning. Not that it really matters now he doesn’t need to sleep anymore. Time has sort of lost it’s meaning. The schedule of eating, sleeping, it doesn’t fit into his existence anymore. Eventually the date will lose all meaning too. He wonders if that’s how it is for Jack, if the man sometimes has to stop and think about what day it is, what month or year or century. He wonders if he’ll one day have to contemplate just how long he’s been alive and he shudders, dispelling the thought. It won’t come to that. The glove won't last forever, he’ll get his peace eventually. <br/>Maggie’s talking to him, and he doesn’t realise it until she elbows him in the ribs to get his attention. Not that he can feel it, but it nudges him a little and he might be numb but he’s got enough sense of awareness that he can tell when he’s moving. <br/>He tears his eyes away from the skyline and back to her, trying to get whatever attempt at a functioning brain he has left to catch up. “Huh?” <br/>“Four years. How...How’d you do it?”<br/>“One day at a time-” Owen hears Maggie scoff and shakes his head a little. “I mean it. It sounds like a load of bollocks but it really is the only way. There’s good days and bad days. Days like this, days that mean something to you, anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas, they’ll always be harder. It’s one of the only times I’ve been glad to be born on Valentine's Day, actually. Get the birthday and the lovers grief over in one. You just have to deal with the bad days when they come by, and remember that there’ll be better ones soon. Easier said than done, I know, but trust me, you seem like you’re doing a damn sight better than I was the first year.” <br/>“I’m on a roof.”<br/>He looks at her for a moment. “Exactly. I’d have been too drunk to make it this far. Probably the only thing that stopped me in those days.”</p><p>“How long have you been dead?” <br/>The change of topic makes him frown. “Why?”<br/>“How long?” Maggie asks again, and Owen looks at the rest of the roof sprawling out in front of him. <br/>“Three days. Still getting used to it.”<br/>“I can imagine.” <br/>He glances at her, and his words come out heavier than he’d been expecting. “Can you? Mourning for somebody else is one thing, mourning for yourself is entirely different. It’s been helpful though, in a way.”<br/>“How?”<br/>Owen shrugs. “I’ve realised things.” <br/>“If this is about to turn into some spiel about taking life for granted-”<br/>Owen laughs despite himself, the loudest laugh that he’s laughed in a while. “No, no, I think we both already know all about that. It’s about the people we leave behind. When I came back…” He sighs, leaning forwards and rubbing his eyes. “One of the people that I work with, she said that she loved me.” <br/>“Oh?”<br/>Owen looks at Maggie out of the corner of his eye. “It’s not like that. I tried to tell her that. That’s how grief works, there’s something that you care about and suddenly you’re losing it so you desperately desire it, even if you’ve never really wanted it before. She didn’t mean it.”<br/>“But what if she did?” Maggie shifts closer to Owen, and he sighs.<br/>“She didn’t. She can’t have done. Not like that, anyway. The last person to mean it like that was Katie.” Owen doesn’t realise he’s saying it until he has, he didn’t even realise he’d thought that was the case. He doesn’t count Diane. He did at one point, but that wasn’t right. That had felt too much like replacing Katie. After the world had nearly ended he’d wrapped it up and squashed it away and tried his hardest to pretend it had never happened. It had happened, of course it had, and she had said that she’d loved him. But then she’d left, she’d left and in Owen’s mind, that meant it didn’t count. It had seemed like an insult, for her to say that she loved him and then leave, not even twelve hours later. She’d left of her own volition as well, if she’d loved him that much then she could have stayed. Katie didn’t have the luxury of choice no matter how much she’d loved him, she’d been ripped away from him and it wasn’t fair, none of it was sodding fair and sometimes he just wanted to-<br/>“And you don’t want to replace her?” Maggie’s words shake him back out of his head and he looks at her with wide eyes for a moment, trying to remember what they’d been talking about. Tosh.<br/>Owen shakes his head, swallowing down the rising emotion and hoping that being dead means he won’t sound choked up when he speaks. “Partly, but it’s more than that. Tosh didn’t mean it,  but she said it anyway because she felt like she had to, and it’s all that bollocks about the people that die not wanting you to be sad about the fact that they’re gone. And that’s the last thing you need to hear when you’re grieving, that you’re not being happy enough or you’re letting them down by missing them or whatever else but fuck, when I opened my eyes...she’d been crying. All of them had been crying, Jack and Gwen and Martha and Tosh and even Ianto had this look in his eyes like he was about to set himself off. And I hated myself right then, because I knew that I’d done that to them. I’d made them feel like that because I’d gotten myself killed like a prick and I...I didn’t want them to be sad about it, I really didn’t.” </p><p>He doesn’t know Maggie’s hand has come to rest over his own at first, not until she grips his fingers. He can’t feel it, can’t feel the coldness of her palm against the back of his hand or the pressure of her grip or the scrape of his skin against the rough stone ledge but he sees her hand move and looks down at it. He can’t feel the wind though he can see it blowing her hair. <br/>“What a pair we are.” He says softly, tipping his head back to look up at the stars. It’s odd, this sense of understanding and companionship between the two of them. He knows why it’s there, people gravitate towards those with similar experiences and circumstances, but it’s always strange to feel it happen in real time. Not that he’s felt it all that often, but it’s a feeling that lingers, that mutual...respect is the wrong word. Owen doesn’t like words, especially ones where he has to express what he’s feeling because he just doesn’t know anymore. <br/>Him and Maggie Hopley will part ways before long, he’ll go back to his life and she’ll go back to hers and it's very likely that they’ll never meet again, maybe never think of each other again. She’ll just be somebody else that’s down on their luck, and he'll just be a dead guy that she met one night on a roof. It probably won’t be the strangest thing that happens to either of them, as odd as that sounds. Owen thinks there’s probably far more to come. Not necessarily better or worse, just more. They’re just two specks of dust in the grand scheme of things, two tiny little pieces of consciousness battling the tides. But here, right now, sat above a sleeping city, they’re the two most important things in the universe. It doesn’t matter what’s going on down there, or across the ocean or a thousand light years away, what matters is the two of them on this rooftop, bound by a desire for strength. <br/>That reminds him of something, and he digs in his pocket blindy, looking for something. He draws a grip full of empty air three times before his numb fingers find the photograph, creased and ripped around the edges. “I think this belongs to you.” <br/>Maggie makes a questioning noise before she notices what Owen has in her hand. “Yeah, it does.”<br/>“I think you should take it back.” He holds it out to her and after a moment she does, tucking it into the inside of her jacket. “Good. Don’t lose it again.” <br/>“What if I wanted it lost?”<br/>Owen shrugs. “Then throw it away again. Tear it up, if you really want to get rid of it. But I don’t think you do.” <br/>Owen glances back over his shoulder and slides himself back onto the roof proper. It’s times like this he wishes he could still take a deep breath, just something to wake himself up as it were. He satisfies himself by extending a hand back to Maggie. “My boss won’t be expecting me in until this afternoon, and I’m sure there are plenty of prettier places in Cardiff to spend your nights. So, what do you say, Maggie Hopley? Fancy a walk?”</p>
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